I'm Jhayelie >_^ Sagittarian. Bookworm. Music Lover. Cat-person. A child-at-heart. Sleepyhead.Loves Kids.Interested about languages, culture and history.Proud to be Pinoy.Loves Disney Films, Japanese Anime,Korean Drama, Country music and Cowboys!Frustrated writer, wide reader. Procrastinator. Late Bloomer. Impulsive. Cry Baby. Proud Once, Loves Twice. OT9 stan, Jeongyeon x Momo bias. Addicted to Hospital Playlist and Midowa Falasol. In love with Jeon Mi Do. IkSong trash.This is me. Whether you like me or not.
Urgh this line. Made my heart clutch and my temperature soar ❤️🔥
It's such a perfect line. Seriously. On the surface it seems so docile. It's like he's responding "How high?" to her request to "Jump".
But when it's about a very not kosher, drunken snuggle and almost kiss on her couch .... whoo mama ! There are so many layers of meaning!
- do you want me to acknowledge this attraction?
- should we talk about it?
- do you want me to do something about us? (me: there's an us! they're complicit!)
- I'm confessing. Now are you as helplessly attracted as I am?
- do we want to break every HR rule about management and romances?
- do you want me?
AND it's so mature! We have an attraction but we are old enough to choose what to do about it. All very self-controlled... but honestly all that does is make us anticipate that moment when the self control just shatters 🫣🥰🤯
Take a moment with me to imagine this same line applied in bed. (I am sorry those tight shirts put my mind in the gutter) ...*fans self frantically*
I've been loving all the hot orange highlights Mr Secretary introduced to her office. It reflects the vibrant energy and heat ❤️🔥 he's brought to her life.
A Love Scout fanfic. An ode to the moment when houses are empty and life is changing.
--
Eun Ho stood at the entrance of his apartment, one hand on the door knob, staring at the blank walls. Despite the fresh coat of paint, he can still easily trace where the bookshelves used to stand. The floor looks pristine, their shiny whiteness no longer hiding under child-proof mats. The morning sun dances right through the windows, unencumbered by glass stickers or daisy curtains. There are no beds in the bedroom, no pots in the kitchen.
Byeol was only a bump in her mother’s body when they’d moved into this apartment, heavy with loans but flushed with the audacity of their hastily registered marriage. This small space had held the exhausted, muffled sobs of young parents. When Byeol’s mother stepped out the front door for the last time, it had held silence.
How many times had he been close to losing this place? How many times had he ended another long day in the middle of the living room, Byeol on his chest, with no dinner in his stomach? Even today he can remember how his stomach churned with the gnawing worry of bills.
You’re forgetting the good times.
Eun Ho forces himself to remember first teeth, bedtime stories and bath times. These walls had also heard baby giggles, play dates and weekend snuggles . She’d bumped her head on the kitchen counter there, and the bathroom was where he’d nervously had a chat about periods and tampons and boys (and absolutely, completely staying away from boys) with his daughter. And yes, this is where he and Ji Yun had technically spent their first night together.
One last check and it’s time for the next chapter.
Finally, after six years, they were finally moving into Ji Yun’s much larger apartment. They could now easily wake up together, play together, and never have to work around traffic and schedules.
Change happens.
Eun Ho shakes off his melancholy and begins checking through each room, opening built-in cupboards and inspecting corners. Under the kitchen sink, he finds something odd - a stash of three plastic doll figures, each as tall as his thumbnail. They lay in the crease between cupboard frame and door. Some old toys long abandoned by Byeol, he supposed. They were dusty, the faces half scraped away. He vaguely remembers the little doll family had come with one of the dollhouses, and Byeol had promptly lost them.
Are they important? Does Byeol want them?
Eun Ho tries to imagine his teenaged Byeol playing with these now. His mouth twists in amusement.
Let’s see.
He tucks the figures into his jeans pocket, and locks the door behind him.
~~~
At the bottom of the block, Byeol and Ji Yun sit on the wide bench seat of the moving van, waiting for Eun Ho to come down after his last check. Byeol’s playlist, full of indie hits and Disney songs was playing. Recently, she’d been asking for older song recommendations. Right now, Hyukoh was singing about regrets and soft recriminations. Listening to the lyrics, a thought suddenly occurs to Ji Yun.
“Byeol-ah,” Ji Yun turns to her. “You’ve lived here your whole life. Will you be ok leaving this place?”
Byeol tips her head to peer up at the side of their apartment building. She doesn’t have to count the floors to spot the unit she’d lived with her father for as long as she could remember. Her hair, now a long, straight fall of black, slides over her shoulder. She’s silent for a while. To her right, a toddler squeals in the playground, rushing down the red slides, chased by his friends.
“I’m thirteen now, Eomma.” Her face is still turned away.
Ji Yun’s heart skips a beat. It’s always been Unni, or Cool Unni.
“I have to call you that right?”
They’d never brought it up before. In the past six years, they’d just fallen into being a family. As Byeol had turned eight, and the new company had stabilised, Eun Ho and Ji Yun had quietly registered their marriage. They’d toasted it together, the three of them. But they hadn’t moved in together.
It wasn’t because of any kind of hesitation about becoming a family, it was just that Byeol’s after-school care was best managed in this apartment building, conveniently three floors above Writer Jung’s home. But now her son, Jung Seo Jun had been accepted to his father’s alma mater, a middle school some distance away. Halmeoni was getting too old to cook for so many mouths. And Byeol’s middle school was a lot nearer to Ji Yun’s apartment. It just made sense.
Change happens.
“Byeol-ah, look at me,” she says gently. Byeol turns to her. Ji Yun was struck at how much wider her eyes looked nowadays, framed by the black metal rims of her glasses. She still had the sweet baby cheeks, but something about her features were subtly narrowing and maturing.
“You don’t have to, you know that, right? We became family the day Appa and I signed those papers. You held onto my hand, and now we belong with each other, for always, and that’s all there is.”
Byeol fiddles with the edge of her white t-shirt, the one that hangs way past her slim shoulders and brushes the holes in her jeans when she sits. “We’re going to be living in the same place now.”
“Have people been asking?”
A miniscule nod. “I just said yes, those are my parents.”
“Byeolie,” Ji Yun touches her shoulder, gently turning her. She moves, but her face stays hidden behind the curtain of hair. “We are your parents. I am your parent. But I am just not your mother.”
Dark eyes, so much like Eun Ho’s somber ones, finally peek out. “You can’t ever be her. You musn’t.”
Ji Yun presses her lips together. What could I possibly say.
She knew abandonment, had felt it herself for much of her adult life. But she also knew, that her choice had been to feed on the dark energy it gave her. Being left behind had given her no safety rails, and it had driven her to save herself, at all costs. One thing was clear, she didn’t want that hard edge for Byeol.
“Byeol-ie, when my father chose to leave me, I didn’t know what was in my father’s mind. He might have known something bad could happen. Yet he did it. Yet he walked away and never came back. I hated him for that. If I ever see him again, I would want to know why.”
“Whatever his answer is, all I know is that, for him, staying would have meant something worse than going. ”
With a thumb, Ji Yun swipes away the tear running down Byeol's cheek.
“Your mother…she would have looked at you, and looked at your father. She would have cried, because in her heart she saw something worse than going.”
“What did she see?”
“I can’t tell you, Byeol-ie. I can only say that she named you, meaning a bright shining star. Whatever she saw before she left… ,” Ji Yun has to swallow around the lump in her throat. She shakes her head.
“Just remember. She named you.”
~~~
Eun Ho taps on the passenger side window. To his concern, Byeol quickly brushes tears from her eyes, then scoots inwards to make space for him. Ji Yun unlocks the door and he drops into the seat to immediately wrap Byeol in the biggest daddy hug he can possibly give.
“What’s wrong?” She just shakes her head and buries her face deeper into his shoulder.
Over their daughter’s dark head, his eyes meet Ji Yun’s.
Ji Yun isn’t sure it is her place to explain. She shrugs helplessly back.
Eun Ho is at a loss for words. In these teenaged years, he’d increasingly turned to Ji Yun to educate him about hormones, and moods and becoming a woman. He thought he’d overcome feeling helpless in parenthood, but no one had warned him that the teenage years would bring new ways to feel stupid.
So he turns to distraction.
“Hey Byeolie, look what I found in the kitchen.” He digs in his pocket for the old toys, hoping to cheer her up with the memory of whatever joy she had had play acting with those toys.
Byeol takes one look at them and lets out a wet wail. Alarm shoots through Eun Ho as Byeol begins to cry in earnest now. He just freezes in place, one arm around Byeol, the other outstretched with the dolls, waiting for the storm to pass. Ji Yun reaches out and rubs her back soothingly.
Byeol raises one finger, and it tentatively touches one figure, the one with an apron. “I hid them,” she sobs. “I didn’t like her.”
The inside of the cab floods with memories. Ji Yun, thinking of the empty, furious days after her father passed. Eun Ho, revisiting every time he had wanted to find Byeol’s mother, but never did. The three sit there, lost in their old regrets.
Eventually, it’s Byeol who breaks the silence. Byeol, who sweeps the figures from her father’s palm into hers, then deep into a jeans pocket. Byeol, whose sunny smile breaks out amidst the wet tears.
“I’m thirteen now. Change happens.” She takes a deep breath.
“Appa. Eomma.” She loops one elbow to each in turn.
“Let’s go to our new home.”
--
Author's note: One day, I found an old toy. My son was throwing it out, clearing his cupboards. This time, it was me who wanted to save it, not him. He's grown up. This story is a little nod to that realising that maybe they are growing up, and they can decide for themselves what's next.
Just rewatched the final episode of Love Scout and I love how their “funemployment” date was written almost like a first date, or at least the kind of date they might have in a much earlier stage of their relationship. Eunho introducing Jiyun to his favourite restaurant, them talking about their favourite weather, day-drinking and going to a photo booth for the first time… Their relationship has been so framed by work and work interactions/conflicts that they haven’t really had the chance to get to know each other in these small ways – and this new knowledge only deepens their affection for each other.
His fans probably held their breath until the credits rolled him to be assured that he is not going to die (because I did) 😅 love you oppa! Do more romcoms!
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